Who does what

A release is the work of hundreds of people. Most of them never think of themselves as part of the release. Here is who does what.

Everyone who opens a pull request. For the release, your part is:

• Getting your pull request merged before the beta starts, if you want it in this month's release.
• Writing a clear backward-incompatible change section when your change requires action from users.
• Opening the documentation pull request on the next branch of home-assistant.io, together with the code.

Maintainers review and merge pull requests. Integration owners look after a specific integration. For the release, they:

• Decide what gets merged before the beta starts.
• Fix problems found in the beta, in the code they know best.
• Flag fixes that should go into the beta or the next patch release. See Get a fix into a patch release.

Everyone on the beta channel. They run the next release a week early, in real homes, and report what breaks. Without them, those bugs would hit everyone. You can be one: see Your first contribution.

They review and merge the documentation pull requests on the next branch, so the documentation of new features is ready on release day. See Writing docs.

They translate the new text on Lokalise. Translations are pulled in with every build, so their work lands in the beta and the release without a separate step. See Translations.

The release team runs the release itself. Steps only they do:

• Creating the betas, releases, and patch releases.
• Cherry-picking the fixes of a milestone into the release branch.
• Publishing the release.
• Writing and publishing the release notes, with help from others.

The release team uses the release helper scripts to generate the changelog, cherry-pick milestones, and find documentation pull requests that are not merged yet.

Members of the Creator Network meet with the team on beta day, and can give feedback on a release before it comes out. Their videos and articles help many people understand what is new.